Out of Fashion, or Just Plain Goofy

Saturday, August 16, 2008

When the library of the late Ken Postlethwaite, former columnist for this newspaper, came up for sale a few years ago, I bought, among several other of his books, a volume entitled "The World of George Jean Nathan." When I was a teenager (back in the 1950s), I fell under the sway of H.L. Mencken, the wonderfully droll, not to say outrageous, sharp-tongued satirist of American manners, who, together with his buddy George Jean Nathan, from 1900 to 1930, in the now-forgotten monthly periodical; "The Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness," took potshots at all things pretentious, most things American.

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